Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 15, 2011 @08:35AM
from the flash-always-seems-to-find-a-way dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Microsoft Windows Engineering Team has announced that the Metro interface web browser in Windows 8 will not support plug-ins — Adobe Flash included. Users will still be able to open a traditional browser interface to make use of legacy sites that rely upon plug-ins. This news follows a recent blog post by the Internet Explorer 10 team pushing the use of HTML5 video as a replacement to Flash video. With Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and other major players already backing HTML5 — is Adobe Flash finally dead?"

Yes, but the primary patent on VP8 is released under an "irrevocable free patent license". From Wikipedia:

On May 19, 2010 Google released VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an irrevocable free patent license...

OTOH H.264 is covered by a range of patents, and payment for the use of the codec is mandatory in all countries which recognise software patents. Whilst there may be some submarine patents still lurking on parts of VP8, it sounds like a far safer bet in the long run. I suspect that the only reason Apple and Microsoft want H.264 is because it raises the cost bar for potential competitors in the browser m

The counterparts that get automatically installed the first time you try to play an h264 file.

The first time the user tries to play such a file, you get a warning to the effect "This media requires a non-free decoder. Installing and using this decoder may violate patent law or other restrictions in some countries. Click Install only if you have verified that these restrictions do not apply to you." If a computer is on United States soil, the only lawful response is Cancel. After the user has clicked Cancel, the dialog shows up again for every subsequent H.264 video.

Patents expire long after the technology in question has been superseded by something else...Look at the patents on MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, those were considered good video formats just a few years ago but are now considered obsolete, and yet still many patents on them have not expired. By the time the patents on h.264 expire, it will be a legacy codec that noone has used for years.

And besides, the ground vp8 is standing on is fairly shaky, legally. It hasn't been to court yet, but google are refusing to indemnify anyone against patent litigation because they aren't confident in the codebase being patent free.

H.264 is technically better format too. That's why it should be picked, not based on some religious free software views.

Not all concerns about the Freedom to use a technology are matters of obsessive fanboyism or faith. There are plenty of pragmatic concerns associated with IP that only the most reckless would choose to ignore. A technology can be 1000x better than anything else that exists but still be effectively useless or a huge risk to end-users or business management.
As an end user, I don't want my choices limited by how many technologies a prospective vendor can afford to employ. As a developer, I want to be able to create or fix technologies I encounter without much bureaucracy, being hindered by secrecy or risking having all of my hard work phased out through planned obsolescence strategies. As a business owner, I don't want the items purchased by my business to be hindered by cumbersome, nuanced, legal agreements. In my view, the diversity and innovation facilitated by Free software is almost always better even in cases where proprietary counterparts have a few more features or slightly better performance.
Essentially, the freedom to do what you want has its own innate value that, while hard to quantify, should be thoroughly considered before making *any* important decisions, both technology-related and otherwise. It's not always easy to predict when and how those restrictions might hinder your opportunities in the future.

Open source h.264 encoders probably aren't legal to use in the US or Germany due to software patents (and I don't know about other countries). Since software patents need to be filed by country (except for the European Union where they can be filed for the entire EU, but software patents are harder to get in the EU than in Germany, so in some cases they are filed in both), such an encoder may be perfectly legal to use in most countries outside the United States. Just because you can legally download somethi

Its not the payment that bothers me, its the outright sneakiness of it. The particular method they use of submarining license fees on equipment based on usage type is flat out wrong. Its a tool, and once you design a tool and sell it you should not be be able to tell the purchaser how and where the tool can be used. Please spare me the X v. Y links of precedents. Its a particularly nasty abuse in a sea of abuse.

While Microsoft's use of HTML5 video will certainly broaden its support, HTML5 video would have happened without it. It's already well on its way. Your claim that it wouldn't have happened without it is baseless. This really has nothing to do with Microsoft being perceived as evil.

... HTML5 video would have happened without it. It's already well on its way.

That's almost like the usual "2012 will be the year of desktop!". We've been talking about HTML5 video for years and it has gone nowhere, except for a few special cases from Google (which have required you to install Chrome to view them, by the way). Even Google doesn't use HTML5 video on YouTube, and their old experimental test player is broken as hell and lacking a lot of things that the Flash player has.

I consume HTML5 video almost daily. Support for HTML5 video in recent browsers is solid. I work for an organization that produces several national and international publications and we publish HTML5 video content daily. Numerous news sites are publishing HTML 5 video. If you want to serve video to iOS devices (and most of us do), you're going to use HTML5. It's here.
Really the one problem that I don't see resolved with HTML5 is DRM. Arguably that isn't a problem. But I have a hard time imagining Hulu or N

We've been talking about HTML5 video for years and it has gone nowhere, except for a few special cases from Google (which have required you to install Chrome to view them, by the way). Even Google doesn't use HTML5 video on YouTube, and their old experimental test player is broken as hell and lacking a lot of things that the Flash player has.

My iPad gets video via Mobile Safari all the time. Are you sure that's not HTML 5 video? There's quite a number of iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches out there seeing video. Even people hesitant to just embrace HTML 5 video because of DRM needs/desires seem to be acknowledging Flash isn't a necessity, look at the various apps like the Android and iOS Netflix app.

Also, my latest notebook (MacBook Air) didn't ship with Flash. I have a copy of Chrome with Flash installed "just in case", but Safari seems to play

so microsoft has magically changed because they are pushing HTML5? Wow man, I'd better forget all of those antitrust cases and anti-google marketing and anti-apple marketing, plus patent trolling and patent litigation.

No, the recent years have shown that Microsoft has truly changed. Microsoft's antitrust cases are from the 90's, you know. Google is currently being investigated for a lot of shit in various countries, not Microsoft.

And care to link some of those anti-google and anti-apple marketing or patent trolling Microsoft is doing? Because they are not. Microsoft has never patent trolled anyone, they have only used their patents when someone has attacked them or when there has been a good case. Patent trolling is co

Google is currently being investigated for a lot of shit in various countries, not Microsoft.

Really that's your argument? A bunch of people don't like their photos taken in public and complain when someone records their open wifi connections and you compare it to the largest anti-trust case the world has ever witnessed?

It's a lot more than that - it's the use of analytics all over the web, the unfair marketing of their own services over others in search results, the sharing of European citizen data to US government and a lot more than that.

Remind me who is using patents to defend themselves against microsoft right now?

I know you might think microsoft is magical, or be employed by them, or generally think they might be ethical, but changes of that kind take 50-100 years, not the timespan it takes you to write up something purporting a change that has not occurred.

I don't think so. What Microsoft did to get OOXML passed is utterly corrupt, and to me at least it carries the same stench of thuggery. Microsoft's management hires good people the way some combatants surround themselves with schoolchildren.

GP's probably got Facebook's campaigns misattributed to Microsoft, but I think he misused the term patent trolling only somewhat: Microsoft has been claiming patent infringement (~we have here a list of 235 patent infringements in Linux~) without ever specifying what pa

So Microsoft is fairly collecting royalties on what technologies they have researched and developed, just like every other company including all the mobile phone makers, Apple and even Google. Usually the companies make contracts along the lines of "you can use my patents, I can use yours", but Google come in as a new player and didn't have anything to on the table. They tried to sneak out of it by leaving the payments to manufacturers (they do that kind of sneaky stuff a lot, like tunneling money between t

Which read-write file system for removable storage media is 1. supported in Windows and 2. not patented?

UDF [wikipedia.org], with some lesser values of 'supported' (I'm not sure if Windows will accept to read/write an UDF-formatted USB stick, at least I'm pretty sure that it won't let you format it in UDF);

Microsoft has changed but only because their competition changed. Going from other competitors selling OS'es (Amiga, BeOS, Commodore) with similar business models to Linux and open source (can't undercut free), Google (mostly untouchable through search and internet applications) and Apple stuck to defining their own thing which nobody has the patience to emulate.This means MS don't have the same grip on the industry anymore, they use to say MS WAS the industry in the 90's. Now they have to actually do some

And yet here they are *TIGHTLY* integrating the browser into the OS (you know, just like Chrome does)

Apple too. They do the same thing with OS X and Safari. It's funny to hear all the Macheads who still badmouth MS for that case in the 90's, completely oblivious to the fact that Apple is doing the EXACT same thing today that got MS in trouble back then (bundling its own browser with its OS).

The whole case was a relic of the 90's that should have never even made it to trial. Bundling a default browser with the your OS today is the norm, but in the 90's it was a new idea. If you tried to bring that case toda

This announcement sounds perfectly reasonable to me--not having plugins in the Metro browser closes a lot of security holes and eliminates crap like Flash that's proprietary, hurts performance, etc. It's a competitive move that raises the bar for other browsers to become more secure and stop supporting things that people don't want.

Microsoft is not the evil company that this site thinks it still is. Time to find a new whipping boy, Slashdot.

Microsoft is only going to support the codecs they want to support, so this is just another way of leveraging what's left of their monopoly position — it's just more evil. The real goal is to murder Flash which competes with Microsoft's own technologies, like the supposedly-soon-to-be-abandoned Silverlight. Silverlight is pure canned shit compared to Flash. You can't even sync video to vtrace on XP. Microsoft literally traded a seat on their board for Netflix using Silverlight instead of Flash. As a result, there is no Linux support.

Actually Silverlight is technically a lot better than Flash. Both technically, and from NetFlix's perspective as it allows better DRM than Flash.

Besides, you can develop Silverlight with.NET and make complete applications and games with it. Flash doesn't have the same kind of support and development tools (Visual Studio) like Silverlight does. Try it even once - you might be surprised how great it actually is.

They are - we've barely had decent Flash acceleration for a year and they're already killing it. I wonder if HTML5 video will be fully hardware accelerated on graphics cards that support H264 hardware acceleration...

The lack of plugin support will only serve to kill Metro as a browser platform, not Flash.

iPad doesn't have Flash either and it's doing all fine. Note that Metro interface is designed mostly for tablets and as a simplistic interface for casual users.

But you're right, it won't kill of Flash because it's used for other stuff than video too. The existing video sites will just sniff the user-agent and serve HTML5 video instead of Flash if required. They're both H.264 encoded anyway, so it should be easy, and they have to do it for iPhones and iPads anyway.

Not likely well enough. I tried Google's Swiffy to convert a Homestar Runner cartoon to HTML5 (which uses SVG for the animation). It worked surprisingly well, except for the lack of audio support, the text in the cartoon appearing line-by-line rather than appearing behind the sbemail cursor, and the edges of shapes not quite lining up the same way as the original flash (creating borders where shapes overlap or don't quite perfectly). Performance on the desktop was, while I didn't look at CPU usage, the same

WebKit supports some of SVG, but not all of it, so iPhones and iPads should support it to some extent.

The problem with SVG is nobody ever finished an implementation of it, even to this day. For a long time everyone used Adobe's SVG plugin because it supported about 70% of the spec.I had to support code for years that only worked in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with Adobe's SVG viewer (which Adobe itself hasn't supported since 2009) because support for features we needed was never implemented by anyone else

I have several customers who have purchased iPad and the lack of flash support is a big turn off to all of them. I have one person specifically who has decided to sell their iPad and wait until they 'mature' into a device that will actually run the websites he's interested in. The iPad is doing alright for a fad device, but when you hobble something then expect users to be somewhat put off by it. Just image how much better they would continue to do if they had just added flash support.

It's good you dropped in the anecdote. Before I read about your one person, I was beginning to think the vast majority of people couldn't care less and tens of millions of these suckers were going to be sold every year.

I was beginning to think the vast majority of people couldn't care less and tens of millions of these suckers were going to be sold every year

Tens of millions, worldwide, is a tiny number of sales compared to mobile phones or computers. El Reg published some statistics the week showing that something like 3% of the population of the UK had an iPad. I'd certainly be happy if 3% of the UK population gave me £1 each - and Apple's profit margin is a lot more than £1 per device - but it's still nowhere near a majority. It's about 73% of the tablet market, but it's a tiny fraction of the personal computing device market.

The correct answer is: Yes, but we don't want the flash ads, online minigames are the facedevilbook's work so who needs that crap when you can play Angry Birds on your iDevice, and who seriously still watches Strongbad e-mails anyway?

Maybe, or maybe, the IE team, like the Firefox team, is awfully tired of their software being used as a vector for Flash's seemingly infinite supply of vulnerabilities.

Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is tired of anything being a vector for software they don't own. Here goes the anti-trust lawsuits again, especially if they use any form of Silverlight... and you can bet your ass Adobe will sue then (and win or settle for a large sum).

Adobe doesn't really care about Flash, as long as there's other alternative. They care about selling designing software for those technologies, and that can be either Flash, Silverlight or HTML5. Sadly, HTML5 isn't really there yet, and it's missing a lot of stuff that Flash and Silverlight have.

What else exactly is going on in the tech world? You have tons of new information about the next version of the most popular operating system in the world coming from a developers conference of all places. It's literally the definition of both news for nerds and stuff that matters. Not everyone who reads/. is a linux zealot. We have jobs developing for windows, and this news is crucial.

ok i agree that slash advertisements are bad.. but to be fair.. Most of the desktop world runs Windows which is MS. and any news of an actual difference between current and expected version is actual news when it can effect ~2-4 billion people.

The lack of Adobe Flash support shouldn't be the issue here. The real thing that should concern us is that it won't support *ANY* plug-in. It seems like everything is becoming a walled garden these days. For a long time, the trend for browsers was MORE "modability" and freedom, not less. Now we're going backwards.

I just hope Mozilla doesn't get any ideas. Firefox is still the best browser out there for add-ons.

I think people here are blinded by their hatred for flash. But it's not flash that's the problem, but rather the misuse of it all over the web, and the way it can hog the CPU rather than giving it only x percent, or the way one can't isolate which tab has the flash app running.

Okay, things could be better in the flash world, but to restrict it, and *all other plugins* is restricting freedom in exactly the kind of way that Slashdotters would usually despise. I think MS are just trying to copy Apple, and that

if you look at FF & Chrome their extensions/add-ons work in a predefined and hopefully secure environment. IE"s "plug-ins" work at raw executable code level at the users permission level and there for can not easily be contained by the browser, hence how easy it is to use a hole in flash to infect the system.

MS would be stupid not to allow extensions/add-ons in the same manner that FF and Chrome and i believe Opera does. But killing "plug-ins" is by far a great decision for security and overall long-term usage.

When did slashdot turn into the "please let me run proprietary binaries from a third party in my browser perfectly supporting HTML and Javascript so I can make ads and the 9913th Flash movie player" support forum?

IMHO, proprietary OSes and devices like those produced by M$ and Apple keep shifting towards being pure entertainment platforms. Just look at the iPad: there gotta be like thousands of games for it already, while the interface and the form factor effectively prevent the user from doing any serious work. At the same time, free and open-source software already emerged as the leader when it comes to science, and is poised to do the same for productivity. If the new Windoze is a glorified blend of TV and game

If I had mod-points today you'd get them all. There's a button in the metro-style IE to switch to the desktop-IE which does support plugins. This is about battery consumption and providing a consistent touch-interface in metro. Plug-ins (especially Java and Flash) are terrible for pegging the CPU at 100% to display some ads, which sucks down battery like it's going out of style.

The desktop IE still supports plugins and trusted activeX and everything else that IE9 has.

Yes, basically it's just saying Microsoft is making it's tablets/phones like the iPhone in not supporting Flash, whilst all normal desktop browsers and Android phones will continue to support it - and most importantly - other plugins too.

Close- basically it's just saying Microsoft is making its mobile shell like the iPhone in not supporting Flash, whilst every system that has Windows 8 will be able to click/tap a button and switch to a full browser with a less mobile-friendly battery usage and user interface.

Holly crap. Well what could possibly go wrong. Good heavens what a mess if you use IE this one on this machine it supports x if you use it that way on the same machine it doesn't freaking great consistent experience.

Flash is the single buggiest, leakiest, most insecure and least reliable piece of software on your average PC.

Adobe keeps it out of scrutiny despite its many problems. Using it means relying on a company with a history of buying promising products, only to let them fester through a lack of updates. Writing code for Flash is like throwing it into a failed tributary of history.

Let's step back....is this more of a problem for Adobe Flash or Windows? If I'm a normal person with the choice of buying an Android or Windows tablet, am I going to buy the one that plays Flash or the one that doesn't?

I don't think Microsoft really has that much clout anymore. There are consumer choices now, and they can just arbitrarily decide to drop support for something without repercussions.

Here's the truth: Windows 8 supports everything Windows 7 supports. In Windows 8, there will be TWO IE browsers, though. The "regular", desktop browser which acts the same as IE9 does today (i.e. it will support plugins) and a "Metro-style" browser, which is more geared towards touch and tablet use. THIS is what won't support plugins. That's it!If you need to use a plugin, you can push a button and be taken to the desktop version of IE. Or, you know, use a different web browser.

Metro IE is plug-in free... Click a button in it to view it in the "other IE" or launch IE from the "Desktop" and you get good old IE 10 complete with chrome and plug-ins and all the blinky Flash ads you can handle!

Microsoft said the Metro interface will be loaded with a minimal Windows 8 back end (DLLs, drivers, etc), to make loading it quick and use less memory, if they supported plugins that would put an unknown amount of time on loading and memory usage and rely on 3rd parties for a fast browsing experience, especially on slower tablet devices.

Adobe Flash: I'm not dead.The Internet: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.Google: Yes he is.Flash: I'm not.The Internet: He isn't.Opera Software: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.Flash: I'm getting better.Mozilla: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.The Internet: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.Flash: I don't want to go on the cart.Apple: Oh, don't be such a baby.The Internet: I can't take him.Flash: I feel fine.W3C: Oh, do us a favor.The Internet: I can't.Google: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.The Internet: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.Apple: Well, when's your next round?The Internet: Thursday.Flash: I think I'll go for a walk.Mozilla: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?Flash: I feel happy. I feel happy.[Microsoft glances up and down the street furtively, then silences Flash with his a whack of his club]W3C: Ah, thank you very much.The Internet: See you on Thursday.

Some major products use Flash websites. The latest version of BMC's monitoring tool, for example (ProactiveNet), has a Flash frontend. For reasons best known to BMC, they migrated from a relatively normal, albeit JavaScript heavy, web frontend to Flash. I'm sure there are other examples.

At work, at least, any browser I use has to support Flash. It would be really handy to have remote access to the monitoring site from a tablet device, but t